As Niagara falls, so do I.

[reddragdiva]

Last Tuesday I went out to a tiny basement indie gig. Photos.

Last Thursday I met ciphergoth for discussion of the exciting world of the future. Neither of us appears to be cackling as yet, and I can confidently state we're both still sharp as spoons. I did broach my complete theory of all art, which I've groped toward for twenty-five years, and has the twin virtues of explaining everything and not actually helping that much. He asked the right question, which was "what does it predict?"

The theory: Art is an attempt to press buttons in people's heads, firstly the artist's. (You can get away without that bit, but you'll be very lucky.) The button pressing mechanism is crafted in a particular time, place (down to the inside of the artist's head) and (sub)culture, and the inferential distance between you and the art is you trying to understand where it came from after it's caught your attention with "oh, that's good."

Useful predictions: If you want to sound like your heroes, you need to understand their heroes and accept they had some. If you did something good and can't work out how the hell you did it, you need to read your own previous mind, possibly in quite fine detail. Random shit happens, like Martin Hannett colliding with Joy Division 1978 to make Joy Division 1979 with the same songs. I'm coming up with more as I contemplate it, all amenable to taking for a spin.

Useful things it fails to account for: liking something that might as well be from the moon as far as the distance of inference between you and the inside of the artist's head. Surface and depth. Why the simplicity on the far side of complexity has so much power. Why The Manual is accurate. Naming the qualitative difference between Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

Work is slowing down for the end of the year, and I actually volunteered to take the Christmas break as long as I can do it from bed.

Comments

[arkady]

And sometimes it's less a case of the artist trying to press buttons and more a result of a button in the artist's head being pushed.

[mirrorshard]

That's feedback loops for you!

[marahmarie]

And sometimes it's both - at once.

[mirrorshard]

The theory: Art is an attempt to press buttons in people's heads, firstly the artist's. (You can get away without that bit, but you'll be very lucky.) The button pressing mechanism is crafted in a particular time, place (down to the inside of the artist's head) and (sub)culture, and the inferential distance between you and the art is you trying to understand where it came from after it's caught your attention with "oh, that's good."

Mm, that sounds about right to me. I think I'd phrase it more like "Art is an attempt to impose your own model of (existence/the rightness of things/moral gravity/nihilistic hatred/&c.) on the universe—it's what happens when a shitload of fire and molten steel falls on your head, and you end up forging it into a hammer. The shape of the hammer head determines what buttons it can hit—the degree of match & overlap between the artist's model & the viewer's determines how productively their model gets panelbeaten into shape." Though there's a Morse curve going on there. That's basically what you said, though.

Useful things it fails to account for: liking something that might as well be from the moon as far as the distance of inference between you and the inside of the artist's head.

All art has a physiological component to it too, so that probably contributes to it. Also, the inferential distance is always going to be very subjective, and much more likely to be further than we think than it is to be shorter. Or if it works according to my internal model of the artist's head (and I know that when I have my critic head on, I spend a lot of time thinking about context & taproots) then it's subject to the same general failure mode as any model: i) when it fails, it's almost certainly because you didn't take a factor into account, and ii) having strong unknown factors means there's no way to predict how, or how much, the results will differ from reality.

Surface and depth. Why the simplicity on the far side of complexity has so much power.

I'm never really convinced by the "simplicity on the far side of complexity" position, because I never know what someone's pointing to when they say it; it could be parsimonious curves, Klein, Duchamp, Monet, Cage, or Hillsong. I'm tempted to say that everyone's brain responds instinctively to efficient (concinnitous) entropy reduction.

[reddragdiva]

Andy Warhol couldn't have done what he did without being damn good at plain old representational art, for example. You could pick up a guitar, but you're unlikely to sling three chords as effectively first time as the Sex Pistols. The question I'm trying to grasp is how the fact that complexity has been gone through to get to the simplicity is apparent.

[marahmarie]

Thanks for this post; it mirrors many things I've been thinking for years about my favorite singers, musicians, writers, poets....all the creative types whom I admire.

[hairyears]

My own theory is that art is a full brain overflowing.

Sometimes it's worth sharing.

[marahmarie]

To me it's like...an itch. You gotta scratch it. In public. For everyone to see. :)

[ciphergoth]

Thanks, I enjoyed it!

You were also going to say something about your current thinking re cryonics?

[reddragdiva]

Oh yes! I have less concerns about it preserving information and consider it not an utterly implausible idea. (Still feel 0 compulsion to sign up though.)

[ciphergoth]

In the pub, I asked you whether you'd sign up if you were rich, and you said no, but you weren't able to give a reason why not. I think the fact that even rich atheists don't sign up is a sign of how crazy our world is, and the fact that eg Christopher Hitchens isn't signed up is a tragedy. Are you able to say more about that? What would you say to Hitchens now if he were to ask your advice on signing up?

[ciphergoth]

Actually, no, let me ask a different question, one I've asked before. What do you think about QuackWatch's apparent happiness to misrepresent the science?

[reddragdiva]

Me having an opinion doesn't make a droplet of difference to anything; opinion as attire is not a useful expenditure of energy, unless and until it is. For the purposes of your question, it appears he's using old information and isn't keen on listening, unfortunately. He appears to be more or less reasonably representing the science as of 1995, which is the latest he has to hand.

I already noted the actual answer to both your questions on LessWrong: you were correct when you said that people will sign up when it's normal, people will sign up for it, including infuriating stick in the muds like me. So that's the condition you need to seek to achieve.

I do strongly suggest seeking out advertising magazing or agency competitions - that could actually produce useful and interesting results. They spend their lives coming up with virulent memes to push things they aren't personally interested in, and they're quite definitely closely in touch with the mainstream of society or they get fired. And when there's a competition, they have fun with it.

[reddragdiva]

Note that this hasn't ever stopped me from having an opinion, but lately I've come to a fuller understanding of the futility of such in all circumstances, and particularly on request. And I did answer the actual question.